The Influence Of Smiling Expression On Female College Students' Evaluation Of Heterosexual Face Attractiveness

Our ability to recognize faces seems to be innate.Faces convey an abundance of information to the outside world.Is a face attractive? What do we use to judge the attractiveness of the face? How to increase the attractiveness of our faces? These problems have attracted the attention of many experts and scholars.Facial expression is one of the most important factors affecting facial attraction.Previous studies have focused on how facial expressions,especially smiling expressions,affect the attractiveness of individuals' faces.Studies have consistently found that smiling enhances women's facial attractiveness;the findings are inconclusive for men.The judgment of attractiveness is very subjective.When all evaluators rate the same person,the difference in their evaluation is mainly due to evaluators themselves.One of the most direct logic is that the observer's own attractiveness affects his evaluation of others' attractiveness.Therefore,the previous research results are controversial,whether it is because they do not distinguish the attractive level of the subjects themselves.Do subjects with different levels of attractiveness adopt different evaluation strategies when they rate the attractiveness of expression faces? Do the type of facial expressions and the level of participants' attractiveness work together to affect the evaluation of facial attractiveness? Through two experiments,this study investigated how facial expressions and the attractiveness of the observer themselves affect the evaluation of men's face attractiveness by asking female college students to rate the attractiveness of male faces in stranger-to-stranger situation and mate selection situation.Experiments 1 discussed whether the types of facial expressions and the observer's self-perceived attractiveness affected their evaluation of male facial attractiveness.The study adopted a mixed design of 2(facial expression type: smile or neutral)× 2(subjects' self-perceived attractiveness type: high or low).Female subjects(n = 60)were asked to rate the attractiveness of male faces with different facial expressions as strangers.The results showed that smiles promoted the attractiveness of male faces in group with low self-rated attractiveness and this effect disappeared in group with high self-rated attractiveness.In experiment 2,female subjects(n=120)were asked to rate the attractiveness of male faces with different expressions in the context of long-term or short-term relationships.The relationship context and self-perceived attractiveness were further tested to clarify the influence of smiling expression on male face attractiveness.The study adopted a mixed design of 2(facial expression type: smile or neutral)× 2(subjects' self-perceived attractiveness type: high or low)× 2(relationship context: short-term relationship or long-term relationship).The results showed that,in the context of different relationships,female subjects with high and low self-rated attractiveness all preferred male faces with neutral expressions.Comparing the results of experiment 1 and experiment 2,the subjects in experiment 2 rated male face attractiveness lower than the subjects in experiment 1.This may be due to the different evaluation mechanisms of female subjects in different evaluation s ituations and tasks.Combining two experiments,the evaluation of male's face attractiveness is influenced by facial expressions and the level of the observer's attractiveness.Introducing the variable of observer's self-rated attractiveness can explain to some extent the contradiction of previous studies on the influence of smiling expressions on male face attractiveness.